Agile Case Study: The Power of Demonstrations!

Demos: Changing-up the customers for Demos at the end of Sprints matters.

At the PDMA Conference we described ways in which Agile can be extended beyond software. A case study from the presentation is a company that is a successful medical device maker who has applied Agile in their organization and seen beneficial results such as greater schedule predictability and no last-minute changes (both of which were challenges before).

At the end of each and every Sprint, starting with Sprint Zero, this organization would do a Demo: a paper prototype, or they might do a mock-up or industrial-styled diagrams before moving on to functional prototypes.

They also had something really cool, which is, they rotated who they did the Demo to. So the Demo in one Sprint, it might be to diagonal executives. Next Sprint might include some folks from the customer, say a customer proxy (customer service). Next Sprint would be to senior executives. So they did this constant rotation, which gave them feedback, but also from different levels of stakeholders. This company had achieved many benefits of Agile development by doing Demos, but without Sprint estimates, and without burndown charts.